1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a methods and systems for managing contacts in a contact center.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers are commonly used to allow an enterprise or business to efficiently handle customer enquiries, complaints and support, and to allow an enterprise to make contact with existing or potential customers.
Traditionally, customers have interacted with contact centers by initiating contact with the intention of communicating with an agent capable of dealing with a specific query. As illustrated in FIG. 1, a conventional contact centre, generally indicated at 10, is connected both to the Internet 12 and to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) 14. Traditional telephony (including voice) communications can of course be via Internet Protocol (IP) based communications, using protocols such as SIP. Customers 16 can contact the contact center 10 by connecting to the Internet 12 via a personal computer running appropriate communications software or a phone 16. Phone 16 may of course be an Internet-enabled phone, or it may connect via the PSTN. In particular, customers can connect to an email server 18, a web server 20 or a private branch exchange (PBX) 22 equipped with a voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) gateway and/or a video interface.
The contact center 10 has a local area network (LAN) 24, which connects each of the servers 18, 20, 22 with a media server/conference bridge 26. A plurality of agents 28 (one of whom is indicated in FIG. 1) are also connected using an agent workstation which is a personal computer equipped with agent client software providing multimedia capabilities to the contact center LAN. It is to be understood that agents may be connected also to the contact center via the Internet 12 or via a wide area network, and they can also be connected over the PSTN. Such distributed contact center architectures are well known and the present invention is not limited to any particular architecture of contact center.
Customers contact the contact center, for example, by making a voice or video call over the Internet or the PSTN, which is handled by the PBX 22. Customers can also make contact by a chat session hosted on the web server 20. In addition to such “live” contact sessions, the contact center 10 can also receive submissions from web forms hosted on the web server 20, or from a customer email which is received at the email server 18.
A typical contact center, such as the one indicated in FIG. 1, will further comprise a management component such as a contact center server 30 for controlling the operation of the email server 18, web server 20 and PBX 22, to direct contacts to suitable agents. When a contact is received at the respective server, 18, 20, or 22, the contact center server 30 is notified of the existence of a new contact and creates a contact record (not shown), which records details of the received contact such as the time it was received, its source, any customer details which can be deduced based on the source (e.g. the caller line ID or an IP address might be used to reference a customer profile in a database), and the nature of the contact (e.g. customers may have access to a first communication channel for sales or a second communication channel for technical support, etc.).
Thereafter, the contacts are analysed and may be handled automatically as far as possible, for example, by using automated response systems and interactive voice response systems, (IVRs).
For example, in the case that a contact received at the contact center 10 is a voice or video call, the contact is subjected to various recorded announcements and the customer is requested to provide information in response to such announcements in order to either dispose of the contact (if automated handling can satisfy all of the needs of that particular customer) or to determine requirements for handling the contact. The information gleaned from this session is then passed back to the contact center server 30 to update the contact record (not shown).
Alternatively, if the contact is an another type of “live” session, such as an instant messaging (IM) contact, or a type of “non-live” session, such as an email contact or a web form contact, the contact center server 30 will analyse the contact automatically as far as possible and storing any information gleaned therefrom in the contact record.
Thus, information gleaned from the contact in its initial stages, for example, from menu choices made in an IVR session, or from the “subject” or “To” field of an email, or from analysis of the content of the transaction is stored in the contact record (not shown) and utilised by the contact center server 30 in making contact handling decisions. To this end, the contact center server 30 comprises a contact manager 32, an agent manager 34, and a work assignment engine 36 comprising a queuing function 36, the functions of each of which are typically implemented by appropriate software elements forming part of an overall contact center management application.
In particular, the contact manager 32 is arranged to create, monitor and update the contact record (not shown). The agent manager 34 maintains an agent record (not shown) for each agent of the contact center, which identifies skillsets the agent is qualified to handle and a status of the agent.
The contact manager 32, the agent manager 34, and queuing function 36 interact with one another to queue the incoming contacts to one or more suitable agents, by placing the contacts in one or more skillset queues. It will be appreciated that while a contact is being is queued, unless an agent is available immediately to deal with the contact, the contact will typically be provided with a media feed. When a suitable agent becomes available to deal with the queued contact, the email server, 18, web server 20, or PBX 22, as appropriate, is directed to transfer the contact to the agent for processing.
The skillset queues are serviced by the agents 28 depending on their associated skillsets. In general, an agent record (not shown), which identifies skillset(s) associated with the agent, is manually created, maintained and updated, for each agent 28 of the contact center 10, for example, by a contact center supervisor. The agent manager 32 is arranged to consult the agent record (not shown) to identify a suitable agent to whom a contact should be assigned. In this way, the selected agent is equipped with the necessary skillset to address the customer's needs, without having to redirect the contact within the contact center until it happens to be assigned to an agent having the necessary skillset.
However, it will be appreciated that in large or expanding contact centers, the manual creation, maintaining and updating of agent's records becomes cumbersome, leading to processing delays, and thereby affecting the efficiency of the contact center in handling contacts. In addition, the manual creation, maintenance and updating of agent records introduces the potential for human error.
The manner of managing contact centers as described also involves further problems hindering the efficient processing of contacts. In most modern contact centers, agents are “multiplicity agents” or agents equipped with the necessary functionality to handle various multimedia contacts at any one time. However, these multiplicity contact centers place an increased burden on the contact center server 30 to appropriately queue contacts received at the contact center 10.
For example, a number of email contacts, an IM contact and a voice contact may currently be assigned to an agent 28. If the agent were to complete the processing of an email contact, they may be available to receive the next queued email contact, but may nonetheless be unavailable to receive the next queued voice contact. Thus, the contact center server 30 must not only match a given contact with a suitable agent, based on the contact record and the agent record, but must also monitor the capability of the agent to handle each different type of multimedia contact at any one time, including consideration of the number of “live” contacts, and being processed, including an average processing time per “live” contact, as well as the number of “non-live” contacts, and being processed, including an average processing time per “non-live” contact. For the purposes of this invention it will be appreciated that “live” contacts generally involve active communication sessions between a customer and a contact center, such as voice calls, video calls, and Instant Messaging, (IM) contacts, whereas “non-live” contacts do not require the customer and the contact center to maintain a communication session, such as email contacts or web forms.
Thus, there is a need for improving the management of customer contacts to thereby provide a more efficient call center service, and reduce the processing burden on the contact center server 30.